Eli Park

He enlisted as First Corporal of Company F, 4th Texas Infantry on 11 July 1861 at Camp Clark in Guadalupe County and was promoted to Sergeant on 1 November 1861.

He was with his Company in action on South Mountain on 14 September and was reported missing - but had been captured - at Sharpsburg on 17 September 1862.

He was held at Fort Delaware to 2 October 1862, when he was sent to Aikens Landing, VA for exchange. He was elected Junior 2nd Lieutenant on 7 November 1862 and promoted to Senior 2nd Lieutenant, Company D on 8 April 1863. He was in Texas about March - April 1864 on "detached service." He submitted his resignation on 8 August 1864 but was killed at New Market Heights near Petersburg, VA on 18 August 1864:

But Lieutenant Eli Park and Pat Penn of Company F, having nothing else to occupy their minds, stood up and peeped over the works to watch the effect of the shells, Pat almost touching me, and Park just beyond him. The firing continued perhaps ten minutes when Pat stepped back, ejaculating, "Oh, pshaw!" in such a peculiar tone as to attract my attention. Looking up I saw that Park's head had dropped forward and rested on the top of the embankment, some sharpshooter away off on our right having sent a ball through it. It was a sad and most unexpected ending of a vigorous and promising young life. He had applied for a transfer to Texas, in order to be near his widowed mother, and not half an hour before the fatal shot, spoke of his application and expressed a wish that it might come back, approved before the detail for picket duty was made, for he knew he would be the officer detailed ...

Service information from Davis1 and his Compiled Service Records,2 via fold3. The quote above from J.B. Polley in his A Soldier's Letters to Charming Nellie (1908).

08/18/1864; Petersburg, VA